On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 09:30 +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:> It's one use, but another one is for diskless terminals, often built> from old systems. In this case, it's to avoid the cost, noise, power> consumption and failures associated to disks. It's quite often done> one radically different archs/OS between the server and the clients,> making the upgrade more complicated.

It is naive to believe that the only thing you need to keep up to dateis the kernel itself: if you are at all worried about security, thenupgrades are a fact of life. Depending on your choice of distribution,then you can make that process easy or difficult.

As for the kernel, nobody has promised you that we would keep allpossible implementations of a given feature around forever. As and whenwe develop better ways of implementing a set of features, we may want toremove the old ways. You will be given advance notice inDocumentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt, and it will be your choicewhether or not you want to follow the upgrade path, or stick with yourexisting setup.What we will not do is to maintain a bunch of parallel kernel trees orunduly bloat the kernel forever in order to support old systems: that isthe job of those distributions that promise you n years legacy support.